Ones with Three Legs
by Edelweiss Pirate
Summary: A brief vignette to bring some life into one of the more interesting enemies in the series: The Striders.


**Disclaimer: I do not own Half Life or anything thereof from Valve, I'm just using their freedom of allowing us to play in their world.**

**Ones with Three Legs**

_(A Vignette) _

In the stories of our forebears, one can still feel our home.

A world of immense beauty, lands covered in beautiful plains mountains, and oceans, a merciful gravity that allowed our great height, and herds of our people, where our beautiful songs could sing out and bring them together in harmony.

Our home has long since been lost, taken away by our masters.

When they first arrived to our home, they promised us a renaissance of our species. One that would take us beyond our humble fields and give us technology, cities, science…Civilization.

Our elders could not contain their desire. Our race had been a simple one, but we had always strived to become more than we were, unfortunately, our design had not allowed such evolution. We were trapped, living in our mountains, singing our songs, our legs incapable of construction, even for most simple object like the wheel.

They promised to give us the way to our advancement, they would help us build, help us prosper, help us join them in their inter-dimensional union, one they called the "Combine."

They lied, they same way they lied to everyone they gave that promise.

They took us into their giant towers of steel and nightmares, they experimented on us. Cutting us, drilling us, and taking from us. It is said that every night our people could hear the painful songs of the tortured, even those in the deepest parts of the mountains.

We can still hear those songs in our sleep, even to this day.

Eventually they took all of us, but not until we watched them suck our planet dry. Our mountains, the ancestral homes for our species, were mined to nothingness, our green fields and forests replaced with barren deserts, our oceans replaced with vast, empty, valleys.

Our planet, our real planet, now only lives in our memories of days past, the terrifying nightmare it has become still floats out there in the starry abyss, empty and dead.

When they took us, they said they had a perfect role in their empire. We were to become tool of their army of destruction. We were to rain death from above upon the enemies of the Combine. We were incapable of saying no.

They toyed with us, cutting into our innards and replacing it with technology. They jammed horrible weapons of war into us, and ordered us to fight.

Some of us planned rebelling against them with their gifts, and some of us did, but it didn't last long. Our masters cut into our brains, wiring them with unconscious commands. If we dared attack our masters, our minds would shut down automatically. Essentially, we would kill ourselves if we dared rise against them.

Now we are doomed to a life of servitude, doomed to cut down numerous species that dare do what we could not. Resist.

Cities burned, forests trampled, deserts glassed by our actions the same as our masters.

It is a cruel joke to make us help them do to other species, the same things they did to us.

We can only wish we could tell our story to those that we fight, to tell them that we are just like them, victims of the Combine's vast reach, but we cannot. The Combine's changes to us our complete, making us the same as all the other species they have warped and twisted into their vile ways, barely any of our original selves exist, we all nothing more than robots with skin and organs rather than metal and technology. We must seem as such to those we fight, ruthless automatons that kill without hesitation or regret.

But part of our old selves still last within our minds, we still sing our songs about our better past, and a hopeful future. A future where the Combine are dead, and we are free from their grasp. Where one of those we fight suddenly understand our plight and free us.

Or until the day where the very last of us falls in battle, where the next step of life will accept us from our existence.

But till that uncertain day comes, we are damned to fight forever, and die forever.

The only life our masters allow.

**Author's Note: **I thought I might as well start my debut here with something a bit small and not very adventurous. (Well, giving Strider's a backstory might be considered adventurous anyway.)

I always thought that the Strider's were a bit mysterious, and seemed a bit more than the organic tanks that most of us view them in the games. So I thought making them much like the Combine Overwatch we fight, members of a species forced by the Combine, either with the force of promising gifts or threatening death.

I can only hope Valve sees this and puts some hints of it in Episode 3 or something. Doubtful, but one can dream can't they?

As usualy, any reviews or comments are welcomed, I'm planning to start some major work here in the future, so keep an eye out.


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